


knell

by brella



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: EVERYTHING'S UNDER CONTROL, F/M, dark!stiles and the gore of love and unsaid things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 12:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1186144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because we tether each other, and it’s impossible for ropes not to have two ends, and it’s impossible for coins not to have two sides, and it’s impossible for roads not to lead to two places, and it’s impossible to live forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	knell

**Author's Note:**

> [♪](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnRxo4DnYCg)

  
_I who have seen you amid the primal things_   
_Was angry when they spoke your name_   
_In ordinary places._   


— Ezra Pound, "Francesca"  

* * *

 

**I.**

_I was so sure_. Lydia was as unfalteringly (as frighteningly) sure because she knows, now, what Stiles _feels_ like; he’s like a violin string that’s just been tuned and quavers out a single note of anticipation, and he’s like the change of a season teetering in ambivalence between drizzly mornings and ambling evenings, and he’s always promising something, knowing something, on the brink of understanding and of sprinting and of bolting, but not in a running way, in a lightning way. She’d felt him there, as surely as she would have if she’d traced him with her hands – he’d breathed and he’d left the salt of his fear on the floor in splattered droplets and he’d hoped she’d read a letter taped to the back of a picture frame.

The way she sees it, either she’s going to read that letter while he’s alive in the room with her or she’s never going to read it for as long as she lives, so if he has the _audacity_ to skip out on her now, now that she might be _ready_ for it, well, it’ll be his own fault if she never knows how much he loved her.

When they finally do find him, she doesn’t touch him. She doesn’t even talk to him. She stands in the hospital hallway and shivers and braids and unbraids strands of her hair and still hears reverberating echoes of the last thing he’d said to her: “I need some help with my History homework; yeah, yeah, Lydia, laugh it up, so sorry for admitting you’re the smartest person in the universe.”

Universes are pointless. They’re infinite and dark and glittering and there are more things unknown and unimagined than there are things she can touch, things she can conquer. Universes remind her too much of what the inside of her chest starts to feel like when she looks up from her notes in class and catches a glimpse of the way Stiles watches her, with reverence, with wonder and intrigue, like she’s a star the way the ancient Egyptians saw it: a goddess living in the sky and blazing down on the mortal world and all its coils.

(And it should be different. _I’ll love you forever_ , or _I can’t stand straight when you leave_ , which she can finally accept, now that not knowing where he was had been making her knees buckle.)

She doesn’t trust herself to follow the prickling feelings in her stomach and her bones anymore. She doesn’t trust herself to hear the whispers twisting in red strings. Stiles had been the only one who’d believed her, who’d trusted her beyond any capacity she had to trust herself, and he’d been the only one she’d failed.

In her book, that’s the same as failing the entire world. So she covers her ears and turns the music up and wrenches her eyes closed to hold back the tears. _There is literally nothing you can say to me that will make you sound crazy_.

It’s not until later (late, too late) that she realizes the escalating desperation in her limbs and throat is his. It’s not until later (late, too late) that she realizes she screams so loudly that she silences the entire block because that violin string spooled around the empty spaces surrounding her cold heart has suddenly snapped in two, and everything inside of her bleeds.

And she thinks of a movie she saw when she was a little girl. _Princesses don’t marry kitchen boys._

_Banshees don’t cry for love because everyone they stand beside is then condemned to die._

_Banshees don’t marry what is quiet._

 

**II.**

Love conquers nothing. Lydia learned this very early on in life, the first on the playground to denounce fairytales and star messages and stupid, senseless things like Fate and being made from Adam's rib. Hope and optimism and faith get you nowhere, not like diligence, not like _hard facts_. Trust the facts, always. Never trust the heart.

And yet.

She’s the last one to admit that the creature sifting like a slow glacier behind amber eyes that no longer linger on her is not Stiles. She’s the last one to run away from him. (But she’s the first one to run back.)

Deaton had used the word _tether_. _Whither thou goest, I will go._ Lydia would say, if asked, which she never has been, but has always wanted to be, a little, that the sensation is akin to one person taking a step and the other being tugged after them to the point of stumbling, caught off-guard, and their wrists are tied by a length of red yarn that never frays. The heart is yanked into starting. The dust stirs beneath bare, restless feet. The road goes on forever. Neither of them is humble enough to ask for directions.

Of course she knows frontotemporal dementia; she’s not some troglodyte living under a rock with no access to libraries or the Internet. She starts listing off the symptoms and the progression of it and it’s not until the syllables start to sound like jumbled gravel in her mouth that she realizes how badly she’s shaking. Stiles’s brain doesn’t deteriorate; it flits and flourishes and yearns. Stiles doesn’t lose and muddle words; he spouts them off and hews them and makes them into shapes (and uses the quietest ones, the softest ones, like _elegant_ and _cerise_ and _almighty_ and _legerdemain_ and _chiaroscuro_ , on her).

Stiles does not die. Lydia has lost her voice, because she has a cold, so Stiles cannot die. Not ever.

Lydia skimmed over childish thoughts when she was younger, thinking them not worth her time when there was astronomy, zoology, long division, epic poetry, horticulture, scales and arpeggios to learn. So she has them now, fleetingly, biting down on her manicured nails and knowing that Stiles is just beyond that wall she can’t stop staring at, and she feels the color drain from her face when the petulance rises from her knees all the way up to her cluttered head and shouts, with stamping feet, _No, no, no, no, no, Stiles is going to be fine!_

She hates herself for the unexpected uncurling feeling of relief when they find out the scans had only looked so abnormal because of the demon stirring inside of him. She’d rather Stiles be a monster than ever have an avenue with which to leave her.

“He’s telling us not to kill you,” the thing inside of Stiles hisses into her ear, with Stiles’s voice and Stiles’s fingers toying with her hair and Stiles’s body heat hovering against her skin. “He’s begging. Getting louder now. Lydia, do you like riddles?”

The thing inside of Stiles has her backed against a wall. She’s the first it wants to take out, it had told her, because she is the last one he wants to die.

“If they’re not too easy,” she bites back, brazen, quietly wrathful. She hasn’t flinched away or stooped over and she faces down the thing with her chin held high and her fists clenched and she is wounded and offended by the way it has stolen Stiles’s freckles (the ones that take on the shape of Orion) and Stiles’s smell and Stiles’s crooked canine tooth from a bicycle accident at age nine.

The thing twists Stiles’s mouth into a wicked smirk, languid and deadly and filled with malicious intrigue, like she’s a butterfly it can’t wait to rip the wings off of.

“Now this one’s been around a while, banshee,” the thing tells her. It makes Stiles’s voice sound like the remnants of a forest fire – rough and unforgiving and colored with smoke. “Listen carefully. I am just two and two. I am warm, I am cold. I am lawful, unlawful; a duty, a fault. I am often sold, good for nothing when bought. What am I?”

Lydia knows the answer. Lydia has always known the answer. It crawls up her throat and waits to be said, but she can’t form her teeth around the single word for fear that her body will follow it.

“Not her, he says,” the thing murmurs, eyelids twitching narrower as it perhaps listens to the cries and pleas Lydia can’t hear (and might not want to). “Not her. Not her. What makes you so special?”

And it is to that question, the real riddle, that Lydia does not know the answer.

The thing puts Stiles’s finger over her heart. She refuses to shudder, refuses to wonder what it would feel like if they were lying on the hood of his car the way they had on the last balmy night Beacon Hills had had before the blackout, when they’d both pointed at the same satellite.

“This,” the thing singsongs with soft self-satisfaction, tapping against the spot with a steady rhythm that matches its words. “This is what be- _trays_ you.” It tilts Stiles’s head, thins Stiles’s lips. “Don’t touch her. Don’t you _dare_? Lydia, are you scared? Can you hear him? He’s making such a racket. So much noise. He’s never been so loud.”

“I don’t suppose it’ll do me much good to try to muscle you into letting him go?” Lydia inquires with an airy lilt to her voice (and her heart keeps thundering, and tripping, and scrambling). She’s five-foot-three and her skirt is short and she just got her nails done and she’s never lifted a weight in her life, but somehow, every muscle in her body is coiled to strike and thrash, to dig Stiles out of the sarcophagus he’s in until her fingers are bleeding and her face is spattered in disrupted earth. She’s never felt further from books, from rational thought. She wonders if hugs can scare away demons, just as kisses can stop a panic attack.

The thing considers her through callous eyes (eyes that used to hold the fragments of the Neolithic) and continues to twiddle fingers against her heart-spot in time with the erratic beats of the traitorous organ beneath.

“We will let him go if you can answer the riddle,” it murmurs. “The riddle of why you tether him.”

Lydia opens and closes her mouth and thinks too fast, and because she’s just a little scared, because she can no longer smell Stiles on Stiles, she does it with her head rather than the obvious choice. She remembers an early autumn afternoon, when he'd turned the radio up on his car and she'd first learned that he's tone deaf; when, on instinct, he'd almost reached over and held her hand, and she'd almost been disappointed that he hadn't.

“Because he’s liked me since the third grade,” she snips, and the thing darkens Stiles’s face so suddenly and so savagely that Lydia winces back, wrenches her eyes closed, prays she’ll never have to see him like that again. She would have kissed him a thousand times, she thinks, sobbing through the contact, learning the planes and the stria of his mouth, if it meant he would blink himself back, right then.

“Wrong,” it growls, all wrong, in Stiles’s voice, a voice made for chattering and whispering, and not for spite instead of heartfelt goodbyes.

It’s gone, then, without hurting her. She sinks to the floor, still slumped against the wall, and feels tears rumble in the corners of her eyes and start to spill out unfettered when, too late, she figures out the answer.

_Because we tether each other, and it’s impossible for ropes not to have two ends, and it’s impossible for coins not to have two sides, and it’s impossible for roads not to lead to two places, and it’s impossible to live forever._

 

 

 

**III.**

“Well,” she snaps, “Your interrogatory expression is getting on my _nerves_.”

And the question he really wants to ask is, “Why are you so scared of yourself?” And the answer she would give him is, “Because I’m the scariest thing the world has to offer.”

And he would agree, and, months later, as Lydia watched the thing move Stiles’s limbs and close Stiles’s eyes and Stiles, inside of himself, roared at every shadow not to touch her, they would both be wrong.

And Lydia's never liked being wrong.

("Ask me again," she dares it, because now the walls of her heart are carved with the answer and laced in bits of red string, trailing, errant, knotted at all the places where Stiles has left a thumbprint. If she has to pull it still-beating from her chest and offer it to the world with bloodied hands, fine. At least she will have found some use for it.)

**Author's Note:**

> for Christine.


End file.
